Tabs

Friday, October 23, 2015

If you know
anything about Tom Waits, you probably
know him as a distinctively-voiced musical chameleon, a singer whose throaty
howl has earned him many devoted fans, like me, and many other non-listeners,
like my wife, who cringe at the sound of his music when she hears it blaring
from my home office speakers. The
sometimes grating rasp of his vocals tells only half the story of Waits’s
unusual approach; his songs come in such a strange variety of styles, from
beautiful ballads and jazzy riffs to carnival tunes and spoken word poems, that
listening to an album of his from start to finish can be a jarring,
mind-bending experience. In service to
the multiple musical styles that he explores on each album, and even from song
to song, he also mixes in more musical instruments than any other performer I
know: you are as likely to hear marimbas and accordions and theremins on a Tom
Waits song as you are piano and guitars and drums.

A theremin

Waits has
spoken eloquently about his use of these unusual instruments, and the way in
which his attempts to learn and play such instruments has broken him from
familiar musical patterns. “Your hands
are like dogs,” he explained once in an oft-quoted statement, “going to the
same places they've been. You have to be careful when playing is no longer in
the mind but in the fingers, going to happy places. You have to break them of
their habits or you don't explore; you only play what is confident and
pleasing. I'm learning to break those habits by playing instruments I know
absolutely nothing about.” You can see
what a radical transformation Waits has undertaken in his musical career, with
the help of these unusual instruments, if you listen to his first album, Closing Time. Fans of his later work will barely recognize him
in this album of beautiful, piano-driven ballads, sung in his normal voice.

Waits’s
abandonment of familiar forms and his drive to experiment musically came to my
mind recently as I listened to an episode of the podcast Teaching
and Learning in Higher Ed with Amy Collier, the Associate Provost for
Digital Learning at Middlebury College. Both
in the interview and in a post on her blog, Collier argues for the virtues of
what she calls “not-yetness,” which refers to a willingness to try pedagogical
strategies that we don’t yet have clear evidence to support. She describes it on her blog
like this: “Not-yetness is not satisfying every condition, not fully
understanding something, not check-listing everything, not
tidying everything, not trying to solve every problem…but
creating space for emergence to take us to new and unpredictable places.” We have evidence for lots of pedagogical
strategies that produce learning; the concept of not-yetness reminds us that if
we limit ourselves only to those strategies, we may never discover even more
interesting and effective strategies waiting out there for us, or that we
create ourselves.

But even
beyond the measurable effectiveness of new strategies we might explore, I would
argue for the pursuit of experimentation and novelty and “not-yetness” in our
teaching as an essential tool for a teacher to remain inspired and engaged
throughout a long career. Our teaching
strategies, like the fingers of a musician, can become like dogs: they go to
the same familiar places over and over again.
If those strategies are producing learning, that’s wonderful; but if
they are leading to the slow strangling of our passion for teaching, that will
eventually manifest itself in our classrooms, our relationships with our
students, and our commitment to our work.
I know that I tend to be good for about three iterations of a course
before I get tired of it and need to make substantial changes, or at least need
to put it away for a few semesters before I return to it. I prefer to have variety in the courses I am
teaching; if I can’t have that, as I sometimes can’t, I need variety in my
course design, my classroom practices, and my assessment strategies.

We can learn
from Tom Waits, just as we can from the concept of not-yetness, that each new
course offers us the opportunity to pull out the pedagogical equivalent of the
waterphone or the theremin and see what happens. In our wildest experiments we are likely to
get the same kind of polarized response to our efforts as Tom Waits gets in my
household: I love him, my wife hates him.
But if we are doing enough of that experimentation, and mixing up our
efforts regularly, we’ll find something for most of our learners
eventually. And if we enter each new
experiment with what mindfulness practitioners call a “kind curiosity,”
interested but forgiving of our failures, we can use each new experiment to
grow as teachers.

Take none of
this to mean that we should not continue to explore how the learning sciences
can help us teach more effectively, or that we should jettison evidence-based
teaching practices. As you will see when
my new book Small
Teaching is published this March, I believe firmly that the best
teaching practices emerge from careful reflections on learning and how it
works. But I believe with equal firmness
that we can become too locked into teaching strategies that work especially
well for certain students and not others, that we repeat every semester without
considering alternatives, and that slowly bore us into complacency.

As I write
this sentence the Tom Waits song in my headphones is a rhumba called “Straight
to the Top,” a song and style of music I really don’t enjoy. But that’s just fine—whatever the next song
might be, it won’t sound anything like this one.

If you have never heard of Tom Waits, or don’t
know much about his music, get your feet wet with his brilliant, frequently
covered song “Downtown Train,” the only Tom Waits song my wife can tolerate.